Communities and Tools for Active Learners

June 25, 2006

Thomson Scientific "rigging their impact factor"?

I am on a continual rant against the policies of electronic academic publishing, namely high prices and even higher firewalls. The absurdity of this artificially-created scarcity I liken to an occult lodge at the birth of freemasonry, when learning and books had to be hidden from the Inquisition. Which is a damn good motivating factor, in that time. I have no clue what kind of rectal-cranial-inversion motivated the current monopolistic lockdown on scholarly publishing, but perhaps the notation below gives us a bit of a clue.

If Thomson Scientific can do this (and I cannot verify the claim, I'm simply passing it on), think of what possibilities are out there for tenure-track people needing to amp up their citations! All you have to do is grease the right wheels, apparently, a variation of what the Bush administration did with Armstrong Williams and other corruptions in publishing.

more evidence of academic publishing being broken

06.08.2006, 10:17 AM

Stay Free! Daily reprints an article from the Wall Street Journal
on how the editors of scientific journals published by Thomson
Scientific are coercing authors to include more citations to articles
published by Thomson Scientific:

Dr. West, the Distinguished Professor of Medicine and
Physiology at the University of California, San Diego, School of
Medicine, is one of the world's leading authorities on respiratory
physiology and was a member of Sir Edmund Hillary's 1960 expedition to
the Himalayas. After he submitted a paper on the design of the human
lung to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine,
an editor emailed him that the paper was basically fine. There was just
one thing: Dr. West should cite more studies that had appeared in the
respiratory journal.

If that seems like a surprising request, in the world of scientific
publishing it no longer is. Scientists and editors say scientific
journals increasingly are manipulating rankings -- called "impact
factors" -- that are based on how often papers they publish are cited
by other researchers.

"I was appalled," says Dr. West of the request. "This was a clear
abuse of the system because they were trying to rig their impact
factor."